Comment by aldousd666

>Elite: Dangerous is an absolute blast.

It's good for a while but it get's boring fast. There is still only one ground vehicle, they haven't added new ships in years, just skins to purchase for cash. Most updates they do now are just to the background story with events like systems changing hands due to the thargoids etc.

Every space station is the same but with some changes to signage and colour. and mostly the same layouts despite existing in different empires so far apart the travel can take days. The stations just function as a 3d mission board.

Star Citizen and even No Mans Sky appear to be moving ahead of them.

Remove the FPS shooter and I don't think there is more here than what you would see in the old elite games. The distances are so vast and meeting other human players is so rare beyond certain star systems that the game should have just been made single player.

a few edits:

I played on PC but was a bit annoyed that they just nixed it for consoles when they couldn't get performance with graphics these consoles were more than capable of. And only came up with a process to transfer saves to PC after the fact(even though save data is stored with them) because players were obviously annoyed they would be losing a decade of progress.

Their process for creating player factions was astonishingly bureaucratic, you had to fill out some google docs etc. As of 2023 they've removed that too. To make progress in any reasonable amount of time you basically need to be unemployed and constantly have a wiki or other 3rd party tools open in a browser.

The had game that was years of the competition but have lost that lead and many of the original Kickstarter plans were dropped.

FDev also doesn't seem to pay attention to anyone critical of issues or the direction things have went outside beyond their forum where their most uncritical players hangout and just share samesey screenshots of ships parked next to things.

It's impressively immersive, but at least when I tried it, not something I would categorize as an absolute blast. The PvP aspect seemed to take a back seat to creating a beautiful and expansive spaceflight simulator. (Which it is!) Mining resources and transporting goods just seem like excuses to fly around and can become tedious. Exploration felt repetitive, too, though I can hardly imagine the excitement of the first player to have an alien encounter.

Eh, if you want to play a game that FEELS like it was balanced with a "pay real money to buy in game credits" feature but doesn't actually have that feature, then yes it's great.

One of the most beautiful and engaging experiences in VR, flight is fun, the freedom is nice, but if you actually want to DO anything in the game, like get a good ship or participate in a plot or anything like that, you are basically stuck doing a couple specific trading routes that the community figured out were optimal and even then it's a slog.

I don't know why video games you have to pay $60 for seem to be so against you actually playing through the game. If you want engineered ship components (some BS upgrade mechanic) you basically have to do a galaxy wide fetch quest that takes tens of hours real time even if you have a walkthrough.